Both works also emphasize the importance of knowing oneself and discovering your true name. But Moana doesn’t just share surface-level similarities with the Earthsea Cycle. Both these pairs, each consisting of an elder sorcerer and a younger ruler-to-be, are sailing to find out what’s making their world sick (and both find out that it ultimately has something to do with an unresolved issue in the sorcerer’s past). Sailing from island to island in a small boat across a world covered mostly in water, Moana and Maui greatly resemble Ged and Arren in The Farthest Shore, when they set off sailing in the old wizard’s faithful boat Lookfar. Even better, little is made of Moana’s gender her father expects her to inherit his tribal leadership just the same as if she’d been born a boy. Every human character in the film is Polynesian, including the god Maui (Dwayne Johnson). Disney’s Moana is a shining example of this. Thankfully, some in the entertainment industry are finally starting to produce big-name stories with diverse characters. Whites are a minority on Earth now - why wouldn’t they still be either a minority, or just swallowed up in the larger colored gene pool, in the future?” Modern advocates of diverse representation in pop culture, constantly finding themselves explaining why it’s weird for (to name one example) an Eastern wizard called the Ancient One to be played by a white woman, are probably used to asking these same questions, even years later. I didn’t see why everybody in heroic fantasy had to be white (and why all the leading women had ‘violet eyes’). As Le Guin wrote in 2004 responding to the adaptation’s whitewashing, “I didn’t see why everybody in science fiction had to be a honky named Bob or Joe or Bill. The priestess Tenar (in some ways the real protagonist of the Earthsea books) has white skin, but only because she hails from the faraway Kargish lands, full of barbarians and people ignorant of magic. Ged has red-brown skin, as does his royal young friend Prince Arren and most of their other associates. Very few characters in Earthsea have white skin. Speaking of the awful Earthsea adaptation, there is actually one major element of the series that both Rowling and Paolini eschewed, and showed Le Guin to be far ahead of her time.
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